Jimmy McMillan of Rent Is Too Damn High Party Playing Brooklyn Show Tonight

Jimmy McMillan of The Rent Is Too Damn High Party will play a show tonight at Europa in Brooklyn.

Remember this guy? That’s former gubernatorial candidate Jimmy McMillan of The Rent Is 2 Damn High Party sitting in between now Governor-elect Andrew Cuomo and batshit crazy Carl Paladino. In fact, Carl Paladino is the only guy on this stage capable of making Jimmy McMillan look like a beacon of sanity and reasonableness by comparison.

As soon as news of The Rent Is 2 Damn High party broke, we all assumed Jimmy McMillan, a former Vietnam vet, was partaking in that uniquely American phenomenon: the 15 minutes of fame. Turns out, however, this is not his first 15 minutes.

McMillan’s first 15 minutes of fame came in 1975 when he self-released an album, record at home, with the surprise semi-hit “A Woman Is So Hard To Understand.” Public Radio site WYNC has an enlightening profile on McMillan today, in which he claims “a bomb attack he suffered in the Vietnam War wiped out his memory of his life before the war” and thus he has no memory of how he first learned to play music.

At any rate, Jimmy McMillan is now trying to follow up his second-round 15 minutes of fame as New York gubernatorial candidate with a third round encore by—you guessed it—reviving his musical career. Except this time around he’s merging his musical influences (which he cites as “Otis Redding, Otis Redding, and Otis Redding”) with his political persuasions.

The new album took just five hours to record, and from the looks of it seems to incorporate the McMillan’s message of political empowerment as well as his personal iconography.

McMillan plays his first show tonight in 25 years at Club Europa in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. As he told WNYC, he’s not nervous. “Every child is my child, and when I look out, I’m gonna’ look at the faces of my children,” says McMillan. “And Daddy’s never nervous around his kids.”